2013 Aggie Awards
page 15

Best Console/Handheld Adventure (Exclusive): BEYOND: Two Souls

The field for console and handheld exclusives wasn’t overly crowded in 2013, but the limited output was a classic case of quality over quantity. A number of releases stretched the definition of what an adventure can be, providing new experiments in story and gameplay, and our winner was the most ambitious (and certainly the most commercially successful) of the lot, Quantic Dream’s BEYOND: Two Souls. The French developer’s latest contribution for the PlayStation 3 provided not just a brilliant demonstration of the audio and visual capabilities of Sony’s console, but also what is possible by pushing the narrative envelope.

While BEYOND didn’t quite reach the heights of its predecessor, Heavy Rain, it does continue to cement Quantic’s legacy as a studio willing to defy convention in providing compelling, mature experiences. Its story is firmly rooted in science fiction, but the care the design team put into the game, as well as the talents of A-list Hollywood actors which provided the voiceovers and motion-captured performances, created a story, world, and characters that we intimately cared about. The graphical splendour of BEYOND was also a joy to behold, from thrilling action scenes in an underwater base to minute emotional details in characters’ facial expressions. Squabble over genre labels all you want, but of all the console and handheld adventures we embarked on in 2013, BEYOND: Two Souls was the most unforgettable, making it a deserving winner of this year’s Aggie Award.

Readers’ Choice: BEYOND: Two Souls

The PlayStation 3 may not have a lot of adventures, but it is the exclusive platform for Quantic Dream’s interactive dramas (much to the chagrin of PC gamers worldwide). Three years after Heavy Rain won similar Aggie honours, now BEYOND: Two Souls follows suit as the top console exclusive, convincingly trouncing its closest handheld competitors.

I am glad to se that all readers choices are the same as mine.
I don´t understand the fascination with Gone Home, but I guess it just wasn´t my thing, at least the readers recognized Cognition for it´s story. I am eager to see if the game of the year will be the one I voted for.

On cognition: i cant really make a judgement. I havnt played it much beyond the demo. But it was funny that the article suggests it won because of association with jane jensen. Im still trying to figure out why gone home won best story… Their methods for telling a story were interesting and well done for sure… but the story content itself? Extremely cliche, bland, and uneventful. The “normal person meets rebel, they become unlikely friends, they fall in love but society disapproves, they almost break up but instead run away” has been done hundreds of times. This game puts absolutely no twist on that at all. Again, their method was interesting… but that belongs in a category like best concept, not the story itself.

I never implied you forgot about Cognition or even that I’m disagreeing with your assessment of the game. I was just pointing out how bluntly you’re responding to the criticism. I was saying you likely weren’t meaning to be negative about Cognition in response to the criticism, but it’s coming across to me (and likely others) that way.

Geezze, is all you folks can do is whine about the fact that some of the editors descriptions in this article are not entirely your cup of tea?
Don’t you see that there’s a little tongue-in-cheek humor in there occasionally?
It’s quite a bit of work to put all of this together, so a little but more appreciation is due here imo!
And beyond: we can all agree that Gone Home won the critic award and Cognition the user vote. You’re free to decide which means more to you.

I agree with subbi. If I were Jackal, I’d get a little tired of having to defend the site’s integrity every single time AG do a countdown like this. As soon as their results don’t match some reader’s personal opinions, there will be bitching about it and AG staff will be called to the question.

Thanks to the AG team for these results, and I’m sorry that they won’t please everyone : I’m sure it was a lot of work to decide. I find it interesting for a small dev like me to discover what you chose and why, as it’s quite a good summary of the best ideas of the year.

The purpose of the awards is to compliment, not criticize. The short write-ups are a way to celebrate the game and provide some context (for instance, mentioning that Jane Jensen was a significant influence) in a way that is entertaining and hopefully not (gasp) boring. So humor is part of the equation. Deconstructing every phrase and guessing that it has an alternate meaning is kind of beside the point.

I’m now wondering how “beside the point” might be deconstructed.

I think the goal is to spark conversation/debate about the games that were released this past year—an awards format is a great way to do that.

I’m sorry, but I really thought that Gone Home as an overall game was crap. Of course, that was mostly for other reasons such as technical (crashes) and gameplay (lack of), but the story was just OK. Definitely not the best of the year. There was barely a story. You can sum up the whole story in one paragraph, maybe 2. I don’t see how that can win best story.

Regarding Cognition, I am also surprised that it (deservedly) won the reader’s choice for best story and best dramatic writing, but wasn’t even in the top 5 for the editors. However, As I didn’t yet play any of the editors’ runner-up games that beat out Cognition, maybe they know something that I don’t.

I love it when my choices don’t win, means i have some gaming to do!:) Swiss Constable Anton Zellner looks really interesting, so i’m gonna play the raven. I haven’t played Tales of two brothers either.

Well… i do believe that Cognition has been awarded in the past (if i’m not mistaken it won best game in 2012… or at lest was awarded with a few trophies).

So it’s normal that the guys behind Adventure Gamers aren’t higlighting it this year.

I played 1 hour of the firts episode and didn’t amaze me, but still i will give another try as i think i’ll enjoy it as the detective work settles in.

After playing Heavy Rain i was expecting much more from Quantic Dream and Beyond. But well… i value much more the “Adventurers” review and community that its Metacritic score… so i’ll pick it up 2nd hand.

The quote from the article: “With all due respect to the developer’s own talented team of designers, we’ll go out on a limb and suggest that a certain “consultant” named Jane Jensen might have had a little something to do with Cognition fairly comfortably claiming the reader award for top story of the year.”

When I read this, I took it to mean that the strength of the story was thanks to Jane Jensen, not that readers had voted for it more because she was involved than because of the story quality.

With all the insults being flung at Gone Home, I would suggest that its story was exactly what adventure games needed - simple but extremely potent and emotional. It was refreshing to see so much effort put not into more and more details but making a very basic story richer with everything you find, and it was the only 2013 game (besides maybe Two Brothers) where I wanted to find out what happened above wanting to complete the game.

I’m tired of AGs thinking that endless twists and turns will make a story interesting to me. Rather, it’s more likely to turn me away. Even Deponia, which should have been a humble comedy series, I had trouble following because of the needless (and endless) exposition, which probably only existed to stretch the game out to a trilogy. AGs need to know how to extend a game by deepening it rather than just adding more characters and events.

^The third deponia really did get carried away in that sense (but i liked it anyway). But really, im not asking for endless twists from gone home, im asking for anything intriguing or thought provoking. The story landed very flat to me. And the attention to detail, and the ability to use the house to tell a story was neat and refreshing. Its just too bad they didnt have more of a story to tell.

The endless negativity is incredibly annoying, subbi. And time consuming, and utterly pointless.

I mean, apparently calling Phoenix Online a “talented team of designers” is somehow an insult because we dared mentioned their famous story consultant, whom the developers themselves openly credit for her valuable input. I swear, some people go looking for reasons to be offended, even if they have to completely make them up.

What’s even more disappointing is that people are using the Aggies to yet again slag games they don’t like. Like Becky (and the article itself) said earlier, the whole point of this thing is to celebrate games that did great things in the past year. If people can’t do that without pissing all over the choices they disagree with, then maybe it is time to reconsider whether this is even worth doing. I expect better from this crowd.

I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in fellow video game players’ inability to look past the facade that was Sam’s “simple” story. Even people who liked the game weren’t able to spot that narrative as a honeypot, just one single perspective of a family, something to intrigue that player into exploring the history of the house including how a terrifying event in the father’s childhood rippled through generations and was finally overcome unknowingly by Sam’s rebellion. Every single place you look closer in the household, from the little touches like Sam being a better writer than her father to Lonnie’s loyalty to the army, you will find not only depth but consistency in theme. Was it because they were feminist themes that revolved around patriarchal decay that the average player couldn’t even register their existence? Other mediums often give their audiences enough credit to recognize subtlety, meanwhile here we get condescending comments asking for depth when it is laid plainly in front of you. Fullbright asks players “what if instead of using the ham-fisted storytelling of other games, we placed the players in an environment that was so rich in detail that they could piece together the story themselves through exploration and rumination - could we trust the player to figure out the big picture on their own?” and videogamers responded with a resounding “No.”

Well, there is a sizable bunch of people that really do appreciate the Aggies (and the excellent Top100 list, which is even more work to pull off), so please keep doing these. They are nice moments in the year that put the spotlight on a genre that is otherwise pretty much neglected.

ahah ! I see that ASA didn’t win in the Best Sound Effects category. Honestly this is not a surprise and I didn’t have much hope I’m very happy that the game was nominated previously. Thanks for that, and thanks for the Aggie2013 awards ! I have to admit that I agree globally with your choices and the reader’s choices. Can’t wait to discover the last results tomorrow !

Richard & Alice deserved more - at least to be mentioned in the best writing for drama category. Also, Face Noir deserved to be mentioned either into the Graphics Design or into the Best Setting category.
My two cents for what they’re worth.

I want to thank everyone that brought Cognition up to the top of the Reader’s Awards with 6 awards, including the top prize of the year! We are very humbled at Phoenix online for all of your support, and we are glad you loved our commercial debut so much. You’ve made us all very happy today!

Thank you all. You’ve inspired us to continue thriving and getting better and better at the genre!

What puzzles me is that Cognition was also in last years AGGIEs, so I guess last year only the first episode was covered and for this years AGGIEs the first episode was probably not taken into account. I think Jackal explained that it depends on whether an episodic game was sold separately as a whole season. The user vote took it as a whole season, including the strong first episode, but should in fact only count the episodes of 2013.
This explains why the critics did not nominate Cognition for most categories.

Yes, we really shouldn’t have included Cognition last year, and instead just treated the whole game as a 2013 release. But it’s tough getting a handle on dealing with episodic releases, so that was a lesson learned. We didn’t include Broken Age, Broken Sword this year for that reason. Then again, we did include Kentucky Route Zero, which raises the same kinds of problems for next year (like Cognition, it probably won’t get the same weight of consideration the second time, but both benefited from winning staff awards the first year).

I agree that with a game with episodic releases, it should be weighed once all episodes have been fully released. It was very hard to judge where Cognition was going with just one episode being released, and in fact, many people were on the fence until ep2 and especially 3 were released, where we could finally show where the story and characters were going. On the other hand, it did help us in terms of us being indie, so it’s always hard to tell.

I think Dream Machine is a good example of how tricky it can be to decide when to consider an episodic release for the Aggie awards. The game will eventually have six chapters. The first two chapters released in 2010, the third chapter released in 2011 and the fourth in 2013. If you waited until the game was finished to consider it, you might be waiting until 2015.

It’s almost impossible to know exactly how long it will be before many episodic games are completed. (In the case of Dream Machine, since so much is modeled in clay, the process is slow—but other episodic releases also encounter unexpected challenges that slow the process down). And it’s quite difficult to compare pieces of a game to another game that’s finished and whole.

I don’t understand why the “traditional adventure” has become a subcategory of this contest. After all the “traditional” adventure is the “definition” of an adventure game and should be the main category (or better to say no category), with everything else beeing a subcategory. The readers awards seem to be far more logical and representative to the adventure gaming spirit that the staff choices.

I mus say that the runners up became a bit of an un-necessary read since it was mostly the same few games in every list…

but posting the runners up is great because it shows that a game you may have discounted, might have a lot more to it… or if you don’t have a huge amount of time for games then it is a nice list of games you should play when you do.

Although i personally think Beyond Two Souls should have gotten a few more awards, I still want to thank AG for these lists, please keep up the good work

I understand that narrow-minded people who only want us to cover the type of games they like are the source of endless whining. That’s about as much as I care about anyone’s personal agendas and arbitrary genre distinctions.

But thanks for your insightful staffing advice, and for your singleminded negativity in an article designed to honour the year’s best games and the designers who made them. Whatever would we all do without contributions like this.

Suejak, god forbid you could actually read the Aggies to get some new idea’s on games to play, maybe a game you’d otherwise wouldn’t have picked up.
If you’re only looking for games that feature PnC, inventory puzzles and in an AGS style, then please do go some place else. I’m sure that there are sites that only celebrate games with such narrow definitions and I’m equally sure they could use a few more devoted fans such as yourself, as the majority of us appreciate an evolving genre, albeit in different ways.

(Subbi) If you think that majority of gamers are fascinated by all this non traditional “adventures”, than could you tell me please why both “broken”
games consist of 60+ pages on forum?And yes, I hate games like “the wolf
among us” because that is not even a game let alone adventure.
Jackal, I appreciate all of your hard work on this site(and whole stuff), site
looks awesome.But only issue is that you’re little unfair on the reviews of
“classic adventures”.Reader comes to conclusion that traditional adventures era is over, because those games are sooo boring for Today’s Youth.